The Unexpected: Navigating Pregnancy During and After Complications

Emily Oster · Nathan Fox

Apr 2024 · The ParentData Series Book 4 · Penguin Random House Audio · Narrated by Emily Oster and Nathan Fox

About this audiobook

From the New York Times bestselling author of Expecting Better, a guide to navigating a second pregnancy when the first did not go as planned—with Dr. Nathan Fox, maternal fetal medicine specialist

In Expecting Better, Emily Oster revolutionized the pregnancy landscape with her data-driven approach. In the years since, she kept hearing questions from listeners on how to approach a second pregnancy when the first has not gone as planned.

While The Unexpected is an audiobook that Oster hopes no one needs, the reality is that 50 percent of pregnancies include complications, a fact we don’t talk about. Preeclampsia, miscarriage, hyperemesis gravidarum, preterm birth, postpartum depression: these are lonely experiences, and that isolation makes treatment harder to access—and crucial research and policy change less likely to happen.

The Unexpected lays out the data on recurrence and treatments shown to lower or mitigate risk for these conditions in subsequent pregnancies. It also provides listeners road maps to facilitate productive conversations with their providers, with insights from lauded maternal fetal medicine specialist Dr. Nathan Fox.

By bridging the knowledge gap and making space for difficult conversations, The Unexpected promises to make the hardest parts of pregnancy a little bit less so.

*Includes a downloadable PDF of graphs and tables from the book

About the author

Emily Oster is a professor of economics at Brown University and the author of The Family Firm: A Data-Driven Guide to Better Decision Making in the Early School Years; Cribsheet: A Data-Driven Guide to Better, More Relaxed Parenting, from Birth to Preschool; and Expecting Better: Why the Conventional Pregnancy Wisdom Is Wrong—and What You Really Need to Know. She writes the newsletter ParentData and her work has been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, and Bloomberg.com. She has two children.


Dr. Nathan Fox is a professor of obstetrics and gynecology and maternal fetal medicine at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City. He has a busy clinical practice of high-risk obstetrics, regularly publishes his peer-reviewed clinical research, and is invited to lecture nationally and internationally on pregnancy-related topics. He is also the host of the Healthful Woman podcast. He has four children.